Sunday, April 9, 2017

The Power of Love (a Palm Sunday sermon on Matthew 21:1-11)

I once heard a story about a city in South
America with a fourteen-lane highway running through the middle of it. Scary as
it may seem, at the time this story was told there were no traffic lights to
regulate this highway. Instead, at various points along the road there were
police towers. Policemen would stand in these towers to regulate traffic, and
whenever they raised a hand, the traffic would screech to a halt. One day a
small boy happened to get up into one of those towers when there was no
policeman in it. He raised his hand as he’d seen the policemen do, and sure enough,
the traffic screeched to a halt. The drivers were so used to obeying the
occupants of those towers that they didn't stop to check if the boy was
legitimate or not!

Imagine the thrill in that small boy’s heart.
“All I have to do is raise my hand just so, and look - fourteen lanes of
traffic come to a standstill!” We laugh, because it’s funny, but there’s a dark
side to this funny story, too. What that small boy was probably feeling was his
first taste of an emotion that has caused trouble throughout human history: the
love of power.

‘All power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely’, and we’ve certainly seen plenty of that in the recent
past! Some people enter political office already corrupted. Others start out
with the best of motives - the desire to do some good, and to serve their
fellow human beings. Sooner or later, however, the seduction of power begins to
work its evil spell, and it’s a rare person who can resist it. It’s not that
politicians are any worse than the rest of us. It’s just that the lure of power
is so attractive that we poor sinners find it desperately hard to stand up to
it.

Christian churches aren’t immune to this. A clergy
friend of mine once said, “There's a game people play called ‘Church’; it
consumes enormous amounts of money and energy, it’s all about power and
control, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian Gospel!” I've watched
people play this game; I’ve even played it myself at times. I too have been
corrupted by the love of power, which just goes to show that my heart isn’t yet
fully converted to the Way of Jesus.

The Palm Sunday story, which we read today in
Matthew 21:1-11, is all about the tension between the way of power and the way
of love. Let’s think about this for a few minutes.

Jerusalem in the time of Jesus was ripe for a
Messiah to come and set it free. The city was under the thumb of the Roman
occupation armies. Powerful people in high places had made their peace with the
Roman regime and were now doing quite well by going along with its cruelty and
corruption. And all the time, ordinary people – the majority, that is - were
living in poverty and oppression. What the city needed was a strong king to
raise an army in the name of God, kick out the Romans and the corrupt Jewish
leaders, and clean things up by force. This was a role many people wanted Jesus
to fulfil.

In the time of Jesus many Jewish people were
waiting for their Messiah. They believed he would be a descendant of their
greatest King, David, and like David he would be a man after God’s own heart.
He would come in the name of God, drive out oppression and corruption, and
establish the kingdom of God on earth. And so would come about the perfect
society, with peace, prosperity and equality for all.

Jesus lived out his life and ministry against
the backdrop of this expectation, and some would say he would have done better
to go along with it. If we look closely at the Gospel stories we can see that
this idea was already taking root in the minds of some of the people on Jesus’
team. In the chapter before today’s reading the mother of James and John comes
to Jesus to ask a favour: “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at
your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom” (Matthew 20:21). She believes
Jesus is on his way up to Jerusalem to become king by force, and she wants to
make sure James and John will be his chief ministers and get the most glorious
positions in that kingdom. Like all moms, she wants the best for her children -
including getting more recognition than the children of other moms. See how
seductive power can be, even in people who are committed to Jesus’ mission.

Jesus chose not to take the route of power;
he chose the way of love instead. He was a king, but he chose to be a different
kind of king - a servant king. He
turned away from the temptation to follow the way of power, and chose instead to
follow the way of love.

Matthew structures this Palm Sunday story
around an Old Testament prophecy from Zechariah. He quotes from it in verses 4
and 5: ‘This took place to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet,
saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble,
and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey”’. In its context
in the book of Zechariah, this is a Messianic prophecy with a difference,
because the king isn’t coming to lead armies and wipe out the enemies of
Israel. Rather, he’s coming to bring peace and justice to all nations on earth.

Kings in the time of Zechariah did in fact
ride donkeys at times, and when they did so, it had a specific meaning. A king
who rode a war-horse was coming in battle or in victory. But a king who came
riding a donkey was coming in peace. Matthew is emphasizing this meaning. The
word in the original language that our NRSV Bibles translate as ‘humble’ is the
same as ‘blessed are the meek’ in the
Beatitudes; my Greek lexicon says it also carries the meaning of ‘gentle’ – the
very opposite of a soldier going to war.

So Zechariah foretold the Messianic king
coming to Jerusalem to claim his kingdom. In our reading, Jesus seems to be
intentionally acting out this prophecy. This is actually the only occasion in
his life on which Jesus is recorded as riding a donkey or a horse. Normally he
walked everywhere, but now he borrows a donkey and rides into the city. His
disciples walk with him, and acclaim him as ‘the Son of David’ - a title for
the Messiah. Jesus enters Jerusalem, heads straight to the Temple and drives
out the moneychangers and animal sellers. He and his followers then take
possession of the Temple courts. His disciples must have thought, “This is it!
He's finally going to do it!” They must have been able to practically smell
their places at the new royal court!

But then comes the anticlimax. Jesus doesn’t
seize power and begin the violent revolution. Instead, he comes to the Temple
each day to teach the people, heal the sick and hold debates with the religious
establishment. Then at the end of the week he practically hands himself over to
be unjustly tried, flogged and crucified, and he forbids his disciples to
resist in the strongest possible terms.

Why did Jesus choose this route? Because he
knew that driving out the Romans and the corrupt Jewish leaders wouldn’t solve
the real problem. They weren’t the real enemy. The real enemy is our human
propensity for messing things up, for breaking things, for breaking people and
relationships – in other words, the evil and sin that infects us. This is the
enemy that spoils our relationship with God and with other human beings. This
is the enemy that must be defeated before injustice and oppression can be
broken forever.

The way that Jesus chose to defeat this enemy
was the strange way of giving himself to death on the Cross. The Scriptures
strain human language to try to describe how the Cross accomplished this. It’s as
if Jesus offered himself as a willing sacrifice for the sins of the whole
world. Or, it’s as if Jesus took our place, the innocent dying instead of the
guilty, so that we could go free. Or again, it’s as if we were slaves to sin
and evil, and Jesus’ death was a ransom price paid to set us free. Or again,
just as sometimes the sacrifice of some soldiers in battle brings a tremendous
victory over the enemy, so Jesus’ death was the decisive victory over the
forces of evil.

The reality of what the Cross means is far
beyond our human understanding – that’s why the writers of the New Testament
struggle so hard to describe it to us. What is certain is that the power of the
Cross of Jesus to bring healing and change to our world is cosmic. But note what kind of power it is - the power of love.
Rather than using his power to take revenge on those who murdered him, Jesus
chose to accept the suffering and death they inflicted on him, and to pray for
their forgiveness. And because he did that, we know that we too can be
forgiven, and reconciled to God.

When the great victory had been won on the
Cross, King Jesus did indeed send his armies out into all the world. But he
sent them out with no weapons but the message of the Good News, and the command
to love others as they had been loved by him. This was the only force that
spread the Christian message, and yet in the book of Acts we read that those Christian missionaries turned the world
upside down.

What would it mean for us to truly follow the
example Jesus gives? It would mean that we’d start out as God does - by
respecting the free will of every human being and refusing to coerce others to
do what we want. In the Christian community, it would mean that instead of
trying to force our agenda on the
church, we would join with our fellow Christians in listening together for God's will. It would mean
that we would always be more willing to accept
suffering from others than to inflict
it on others. It would mean that we would be continually reaching out to those
who have rejected us with the healing love of God in Christ. It would mean that
we would take the hard road of sacrificial love instead of the easy road of
playing power games.

“That's a tall order!” Yes, of course it is!
Jesus never said that Christianity would be easy. He said, “If any want to
become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and
follow me” (Mark 8:34). The way of the cross is always hard - but it’s the only
way to spread the Kingdom of God. So let us resolve today that we will follow
the example of Jesus. Let’s speak the truth in love as he did, and let’s be
willing to walk the hard road of the cross in love for others. As we Christians
learn to do that – to walk the way of love, not the way of coercion - I believe
we’ll see the power of God's love unleashed in a new way to transform the
world. That can begin today, in the places where we live, as the Holy Spirit
works through you and me.